Word: bond
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course, we Americans knew that, felt it in our marrow as we marched raucously across a continent. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner explained it to us in 1893, when he wrote of the closing of our Western frontier. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States...
This savagely funny scene, as momentarily plausible onstage as it is < preposterous in the retelling, is the central event of Edward Bond's Restoration, a stunning leftist anthem masquerading as a literary curiosity. The play marries the style of, say, Congreve or Farquhar with that of Bertolt Brecht: it blends a knowing pastiche of early 18th century comedy of manners with a 20th century call for revolution. Bond, 51, author of such dramas as Saved (1965) and The War Plays (1985), has for two decades been described as one of Britain's most promising playwrights. Yet his work has remained...
Restoration comedy depicted a world obsessed with money, manners, fashion and family tree, severe in its standards of social acceptability and brutal in its treatment of those deemed unfit. Bond's adaptation of the genre retains its rounded invective and withering humor. The wicked lord, pondering the corpse of his rich, social-climbing bride, decides to prop her up at the table: "Stretched out on the floor could only encourage the lowest of surmises." His equally malicious mother, listening to the plea on bended knee of the duped servant's wife, says imperiously, "Get up, child. A thing...
...uproarious, winsome and infuriating as the despicable Lord Are. Casey Biggs and Kim Staunton bring dignity and slow- dawning horror to the doomed servant Bob and his wife. And Tom Hewitt excels as the lord's other footman, as defiant as Bob is trusting. In a sardonic twist by Bond, this challenge to authority gets nowhere. Caught as a runaway thief, the self-assertive servant, like the deferential one, is hanged on an unjust...
Naturally, then, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals have invited Stallone to Cambridge to pay him homage as their 1986 Man of the Year. Stallone has "strengthened the bond between himself and the American public," the Theatricals press release reads, "introducing yet another solid and unforgettable character to American cinema." Unforgettable or unforgiveable, Stallone's Rambo flashes across our big screen culture--a modern-day excuse for a Hercules...